Most Popular Books by Richard Holmes

The definitive biography of Sir John French, by the increasingly famous Richard Holmes. Sir John French is a figure who has always aroused controversy. Douglas Haig despised him, while Churchill thought his leadership qualities unsurpassed. Despite being the most capable cavalry leader of his generation, posterity has judged him an unfeeling butcher, responsible for more deaths in the first two hours of the battle of Loos than all the casualties on both sides in the 1944 D-Day landings. But there was another side to French, which is only revealed in his private papers. If his public life was controversial, his private life was positively scandalous: he courted dismissal after an affair with a fellow officer''s wife, and had a string of beautiful and well-connected mistresses. And far from being the unfeeling butcher of popular myth, he was personally tormented by what he termed ''glory and her twin sister murder''. The lengthening casualty lists on the Western Front filled him with despair, as he envisaged his room at GHQ filled with the ''silent army'' of the dead.

Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, Tommy is the first history of World War I to place the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage.

Napoleon was the colossus of his age. He rose to become one of Revolutionary France''s most successful generals, before being crowned emperor in December 1804. This book tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, bringing 30 items of facsimile memorabilia, which have been researched from museum collections around the world.

From the redcoat who served Charles II to the modern, camouflage-clad guard at Camp Bastion, from battlefield to barrack-room, this is a magisterial social history of the British soldier.

Endorsed by the IWM, the book includes rare memorabilia from their archives, as well as painstakingly researched documents from the archives of D-Day museums in Normandy.

A handsomely illustrated photographic account, by the bestselling author of ''Tommy'' (2003), of the human experience of war as directly witnessed by British soldiers in the First World War.

The story of an unusual friendship between Samuel Johnson and the poet, playwright and convicted murderer Richard Savage.